The Message

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, enslavement, and racist violence, including a reference to the murder of George Floyd.

Coates includes an epigraph in which a formerly enslaved person tells the story of how he and his fellow enslaved people surreptitiously learned to read and write even though their owners didn’t intend for them to learn. They passed this knowledge on to each other.

Coates explores the purpose of education and the power of narrative in this essay. As a young student, Coates was bright but didn’t thrive because he couldn’t follow rules or instructions. As an adult, he has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and in retrospect, he realizes that this was a probable contributing factor, but he maintains that the deeper problem was with the education system itself. The purpose of the education he got was to make him compliant, not to foster the open-ended inquiry that he craved and that continues to form the core of his work. What he enjoyed but didn’t get much of was experiential education. He still remembers the things that he learned in hands-on settings. He learns best when he can take a concept, analyze it, and place it in the real world.